like tidy desks, make sure various banal procedures are followed, our email sigs are all the same format, no eating cereal at desks. Just go along with it for a bit without saying anything, let the dust settle, then carry on exactly as you were before.

People making up their own shitty sig with bold characters, fonts, colours, little logos, and whatnot are a menace. Anyone applying stationery needs to be strung up.

Not that companies can be trusted to get it right any more than individuals can. Fuck "Please consider the environment...". Fuck all your little logos and awards. Fuck "If you are not the intended recipient...". Fuck fax numbers in an email. Fuck having Tel:/T:/E:/W: before anything. Fuck anything that's not simply and unobtrusively telling me who you are or what you do or how to contact you.

like huge pictures and wacky colours etc, but my place got focussed on making sure they were completely uniform and identical, right down to font and size and where and when each line started. Then they would change it a few weeks later, or another mail would go out having a moan about it. I don't see the issue, it makes the response seem more personal if some say "regards" and some say "with thanks" or whatever. Otherwise it may have come from a robot.

and managed to become part of the support staff so was off the phones. Which was good in a way, but then head office started being concerned about our average handle times, wrap times and other dull things. So us floorwalkers basically ended up instead of helping people who were stuck with systems or with tricky customers, we were walking back and forth to a screen showing what the agents were doing and chasing them to hurry up if they were typing notes. Or telling them to hang up and call the customer back if the call was over 600 seconds. I felt a right arsehole, glad I got out of that one.

was the sickness rate and people leaving went up massively, so we had to pay to hire new people, train them, and they inevitably weren't as good so had to be chased to finish calls quicker. And so it carried on.

I had to budget for 4 departments across 3 call centres, and the finance answer was always 'Just take 15 seconds off the AHT, it won't affect conversion and will save us x amount'.

It got to the point where I had to actually draw out a call map for the management explaining what exactly they were asking their staff to sell and cross-sell and how did they expect them to do it faster?